Transmission Arts: The Air that Surrounds Us

Early electromagnetic spectrum chart produced by Westinghouse Research Laboratories in the early-twentieth century.

When speaking about Transmission Arts in terms of contemporary media and conceptual art, quantifying the movement is an implicitly difficult charge. In simplest terms “Transmission Arts” is defined as a multiplicity of practices and media working with the idea of transmission or the physical properties of the electromagnetic spectrum (radio). Transmission works often manifest themselves in participatory live art or time-based art, and include, but are not limited to, sound, video, light, installation, and performance. Like the work encompassed by the genre, its lineage is anything but linear.

Influenced by Futurism in music, noise, speed, experimentation and improvisation with and about machinery and technology are all reoccurring areas of interest. The spirit of Fluxus is also frequently encountered when works are centered around the indeterminacy of spectrum content, whether it be manipulation of commercial radio in any present moment, or the harnessing of solar data to inform design and movement. kinetic art is also an obvious ancestor to transmission works that take sculptural form, and here, motion might materialize in the physical, aural, or visual.

Perhaps the most explicit predecessors are the media collectives that emerged in the 1970s to see a radical opportunity in video as a tool that might at long-last realize democratic cultural communication networks. In the following decades, artists’ experimentation with global technologies including telephone, fax, and satellite also aimed to put new communication tools in the hands of artists and the public. Later, in the 1990s, the Microradio movement empowered a wave of radio practitioners and activists dedicated to a specific cause: providing the public with licensed access to their own airwaves.

In 1997 then journalist and DJ Tom Roe, musician Greg Anderson, and painter Violet Hopkins formed the collective free103point9 in Brooklyn, New York. Aligned with the Microradio movement, free103point9’s activities in the early years were focused on providing local communities access to their own airwaves. At that time free103point9 principals tirelessly traveled around New York City rooftops, transmitter and antenna in-tow, microcasting local bands, community meetings, and other happenings to listeners in the event’s surrounding few block radius.

As a result of these activities, a notable community of free103point9 collaborating artists emerged who were interested in the act of transmission as creative expression, conceptually and formally. For these artists, microradio was not simply a distribution device, but rather an exciting gateway to experimentation with the entire (electromagnetic) spectrum. In 2002, free103point9 responded and evolved from artist collective to non-profit organization with the specific mission of establishing and cultivating the Transmission Art genre. Supportive of “radio art” and “creative radio” the “transmission art” nomenclature was carefully selected to encompass not only linear works made for radio dissemination, but multifaceted and interdisciplinary works created through the full radio spectrum in its broadest definition.

As a means to illustrate such efforts, freee103point9 regularly presents a number of public programs engineered to demystify the architecture of the transmission spectrum. They include:

Tune(In)))s are sound events designed for a virtually silent environment in which listeners experience multiple live performances in individual radio headsets as opposed to amplified ones within a performance space. Audience members encounter other signals on the FM dial as they navigate among the Tune(In))) frequencies, thus considering the spectrum as a potential venue in and of itself.¹

Radio 4x4 is a collaborative radio transmission performance. Four simultaneous audio performances are separately sent through FM transmitters tuned to different frequencies and are picked up by radios positioned throughout a performance space and tuned to those four frequencies. The audience becomes an active collaborator in the performance, “mixing” the audio feeds by moving about the space among the four signals.²

Microradio Sound Walk is a multiple transmitter sound piece and walking tour of local artist-generated airwaves. The piece consists of multiple transmission stations situated along a loosely defined walking path tuned to a single frequency but with a limited range. At each station an artist creates a...